


Endgames

by attice



Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, Post-Avengers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-05
Updated: 2013-01-05
Packaged: 2017-11-23 19:43:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/625851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attice/pseuds/attice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Start with a card game. There's Natasha and Hill and Fury and Coulson and Stark, too. Clint is a spy, and Clint has killed more people than he'd like to remember, and Clint lies to put bread on the table, but Clint also, incidentally, has a terrible poker face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Endgames

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this while procrastinating on my Avengersfest fic, which probably explains the lack of porn.
> 
> Includes a few sentences' worth of vague, non-detailed, mindfuck non-con.

Start with a card game. Who’s there? Natasha, Hill, and Fury, sitting at a round table. The red and blue backs of cards frown at you as they shuffle them, rearrange them. How many nights have you spent doing this—sitting in dimly-lit hallways with a pounding headache and a rifle on your lap, playing Cheat with security guards that you’d shoot when the sun came up? You don’t remember. You don’t remember much of anything anymore.

Fury shuffles; Natasha deals. Stark comes in with a bag of Cheetos and something to do, but he sits down and the five of you start again.

 

-

 

When you come back for good, there are a few things that they have to tell you. Number one, Coulson’s dead. Number two, you have moved up on SHIELD’s threat list. Number three, they need to run some tests on you, Agent Barton, so they’ve cleared your schedule for the next three weeks. You had a few ops planned? Don’t worry about them. They’ll find another agent.

The first time, they just take your vitals. Your blood pressure, your vision, your hearing—they check your heartbeat three times. They make you jog in place, do jumping jacks, and they check your heartbeat again. They dope you up and you can feel cold metal and a warm hand on your chest, far away, as you fall asleep.

The second time, which is a few hours after the first, they ask you questions.

The second time, they get a very harassed-looking Fury, who sits down in front of the one-way mirror on the wall and fixes his eye on yours with a sigh.

“You know I don’t want to do this,” he says, and you can almost hear twenty SHIELD psychoanalysts groaning behind the glass.

“I know,” you say.

He has a file full of photographs in front of him. He takes them out, one by one, and holds them up. Have you seen this man? Have you heard Loki speak to her? How about this one? How many times have you interacted with this scientist? What are her qualifications? What about him?

Basic stuff. You can tell that Fury doesn’t think he gets paid enough for this.

“How about this man?” he asks, holding up a blurry picture of a redhead with glasses and a scar just below his hairline leaving a cafe that you recognize from somewhere in Tübingen.

“I killed him,” you say.

The analysts stir behind the glass, picking their heads out of their arms. Fury looks like he regrets asking.

“How?” he asks. Basic stuff. You can hear twenty pairs of ears perking behind your reflection.

“I cut his heart out,” you say.

“Why?”

“Loki told me to,” you say, and you tell yourself that is the whole truth.

They ask, you answer. You are not chained here; they will not, and cannot, make you stay. They take your blood pressure every five minutes, and they rope a familiar face into asking you the questions. When you’ve had enough, you can walk out. It’s basic stuff.

 

-

 

Number one, Coulson’s dead. How do you feel about that? Loki killed him, Fury tells you, and Hill shoots him a sideways look when he says it, but you think that you might as well have snapped his neck yourself.

You have known Coulson for a long time. You’ve worked with him for eighteen, almost nineteen years. You know his favorite food, and his favorite songs, and the things his voice had to do to hit the high notes. You’ve seen him hold the hands of crying rookies after their first missions, and you’ve seen him wash the blood of presidents off his hands in the grimy Burger King bathrooms. Loki killed him. Fury was there, during Coulson’s last few breaths. Loki killed him, but you think that you might as well have snapped his neck yourself.

How do you feel about that?

You shrug. The analysts are not happy.

Eventually, they get tired of the brainwashed-survivor bullshit. They start playing hardball; they take Fury away, replace him with some twenty-something with a head full of hair and a voice so slow that it makes you want to retch. You watch his nose when he talks to you. It flares with every vowel.

“Come on, Mr. Barton. You’ve known him for almost twenty years. You must have some feelings about Agent Coulson’s death.”

Are they calling you Mr. Barton on purpose?

“He was a good man,” you say, “and now he’s a dead man.”

There’s a pause, and twenty pens scribble behind the wall. Someone speaks through his earpiece—tiny, flesh-colored, but SHIELD tech nevertheless, and you recognize the way he twitches when the sound starts. You watch his fingers, his eyelashes, and then you look into your own face in the mirror.

What color are your eyes?

“Mr. Barton,” he says, and you watch his nostrils widen four times—“Mr. Barton, you’re free to go.”

-

 

Life goes on. Life goes on, doesn’t it?

You have two weeks left of nothing to do, courtesy of SHIELD. You don’t have a home, unless your apartment counts—some two-bit shithole with thin white walls and no space, even though there’s nothing in it. Stark says he a floor all for you, and you tell him, in more words, where exactly to shove that floor, but two nights staring at the cracks in the ceiling and listening to your neighbors scream and fuck and cry has you coming back with less pride than you’d like.

“Hello, Mr. Barton,” she says, and then she glances at your file in the tablet she’s holding—discreetly, of course—and blinks. “Agent Barton.”

Maybe, once, you’d have told her to call you Clint, but all you do today is let Pepper Potts show you up to the second-highest floor. You’re staying in Stark Tower, after all.

There’s more space than you need. There is a living room, and a pool, and a kitchen, and a library, and an entertainment room, and a laundry room, and six bedrooms, and other empty rooms that seem to be tastefully-decorated free space in case you decided to host a party. There is a bathroom that you could fit your whole apartment inside. One day, you count fifty-five rooms on your floor.

In the end, you use two of them. You watch TV, and sometimes make yourself sandwiches. Usually, you fall asleep somewhere on the couch, just before the late-night Joy of Painting re-runs start, and usually, you wake up in time for the soap operas. Sometimes, SHIELD calls you to come down, and eventually, they come to your door with concealed firearms and little blue pieces of paper that you figure are their equivalent of subpoenas. Do they work? You have been working at SHIELD for eighteen, nineteen years. Nevertheless, they find a better weapon.

“Good morning, Mr. Barton,” Pepper says, and she doesn’t look too surprised at your five o’clock shadow and orange Dorito stripes. “You have a busy schedule today, so why don’t we get started?”

 

-

 

You were born somewhere in Waverly, Iowa. When you were six years old, your parents d—

 

-

 

“What do you see here?”

You see a black splatter with smears of brain fragments pooling around it. You see the wall behind the last man you killed. You see the jam on the toast you bought for yourself the morning after, and you see the blood you wiped off your money before you gave it to the smiling waitress.

“Jam,” you say.

He switches to the next card. “And what about here?”

You see—

“A family,” you say.

The Rorschach test takes a long time. They show you more pictures, and you tell them more lies, and they ask you questions. You’d never thought you’d say you miss Fury, but you do; here, you’re blind, and the questions are traps. You can see it in the agent’s eyes—he’s waiting for you to take a wrong step. How sane are you, Agent Barton?

They start off easy. When were you put under Loki’s control? What did Loki tell you to do?

“You attempted to murder Director Fury,” he says.

You don’t say anything.

“Did Loki tell you to do that?”

What do you say to that? He pulls a video file on his tablet, maybe to make it easier, though you think, most likely, harder. The both of you watch it—or, rather, you watch it, and he watches you. Loki appears in a puff of smoke, like some cheap circus trick—you can smell it, like burning rubber and incense, and Fury says—

Eventually, Loki grabs your arm. You try to twist away, and when you can’t, you wince and flash your teeth. How many seconds do you have left? Loki is in front of you, and he opens his mouth and says something that you didn’t catch the first time around. You hear it now. Loki looks into your eyes, at your face, and then he presses the tip of the spear into your chest. Do you remember what it felt like?

Your eyes turn black, and then they turn blue.

 

-

 

You were born somewhere in Waverly, Iowa. When you were seven years old, your parents died in a car crash, and you and your brother Barney were sent to live in an orphanage. When you were six years old, Barney was nine. How much is three years? It was a lot back then.

When you were six years old, your mother would wake you up for first grade at seven o’clock every morning. Your brother would always use up all of the warm water, and he’d always bump your shoulder when he came out. Did you hate him for it? You weren’t tall enough to look at yourself in the mirror, anyway, but if you stood on your toes, you could see the tips of your fingers.

Barney would always get to the bus stop first. You were never very good at being on time.

 

-

 

Have you ever had someone take your brain out and play? Pull you out and stuff something else in? Do you know what it’s like to be unmade?

The answer is yes and no. What exactly did Loki do to you?

 

-

 

You wake up when you hear the window open. Your fingers curl around a bow that isn’t there, and then you drop to a crouch beside your bed and open the drawer with the Tylenol and the crumpled-up tissues inside. Something is moving in the living room. The blinds are drawn, and the curtains are heavy, but you can see stripes of moonlight spilling underneath the door.

You open the drawer. There’s a book in there; you trace the spine, snap the latch off the edge, and pull the Colt M1911 out of your hollow Gideon Bible.

Your blood is pumping as you press yourself against the wall beside your door. For a second, you try to figure why—it’s never been like this. You aren’t bloodthirsty, never have been, and you have never derived any joy from slitting throats and blasting brains. Your index fingers wrap around the trigger. You—

Someone knocks on the door, and your breath stops in your throat.

“Put the gun down,” she says; “It’s me.”

You can hear her walking away, again, and then the TV makes the little two-note whistle it does when it’s turned on. You listen to your own breath, which is coming strangely fast, and then your hands drop back down to your sides. You open the door. You don’t put the gun down.

Natasha is watching TV on the sofa, wearing her zip-up black suit. You call it the catsuit, even though she hates that—what did she say, the first time you said it? Natasha said it made her sound like one of those ridiculous cartoon superheroes, and then the both of you turned to look at Stark and Rogers and Banner hissing at each other over the conference table like kids fighting over the last piece of cake—and then you looked back at each other and laughed like you hadn’t in _months_.

Natasha is—

Natasha is watching TV on the sofa, dressed for business.

“You could just use the door,” you say.

“Too easy,” she says, not looking up from the flickering screen; “Stark has three alarms set on the door, but there are twenty-two on the windows. Has to get his money’s worth, I suppose.” You sit in the armchair next to her, and then she looks up at you. The corners of her mouth twitch.

You flick a Dorito off of the armrest. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

“That’s the thing,” Natasha says. “People like us don’t get dull. Would you like to assist me with my work tonight, Agent Barton?”

 

-

 

It turns out that ‘assist’ really means darting alongside Natasha in the dark and taking out a few guards every now and then so she won’t have to strain her wrists too much. The two of you are somewhere in Rio Rancho, and it’s comfortingly unglamorous work; the air is eighty degrees hot and humid as hell, and you’re infiltrating a base of one of the cartel’s men north of the border. Instead of snipers and hordes of security cameras with planted heat-seeking missiles, there are barbed wire-lined fences and a few sleepy-looking dogs.

“Really, Nat?” you ask, as she scales a chain-link fence and stabs a tranquilizer into the neck of an unassuming Rottweiler—“Don’t know if you’ve figured it out, but this is actually kind of embarrassing. Going from assassinating the prime minister of France to taking care of drug dealers in the middle of goddamn fucking New Me—”

“I’m unwinding,” she says, which really means _this is my fun work._ The two of you skirt just past the edge of the floodlights, and she lets you pick the lock.

 

-

 

Hill doesn’t take her eyes off you until you leave the room.

What did Fury say, that first time? You can’t remember it clearly—that was in the beginning. You remember the sensation of feeling like a key had been turned, and a door had been opened—you could see, and you could breathe, and you could _feel,_ for the first time in your whole life. Loki was—

 _Agent Barton has turned_.

Loki was behind it, the SHIELD your therapist tells you; “You don’t have to feel guilty about the things you did, Mr. Barton. That wasn’t you.”

 

-

 

You were born somewhere in Waverly, Iowa. When you were seven years old, your parents died in a car crash, and you and your brother Barney were sent to live in an orphanage. When you were six years old, Barney was nine. When you were seven, Barney was ten. How much is three years?

You were seven and full of story-books with pictures and big, empty dreams; you were seven, and the bruises on your arms didn’t matter as much as they would later.

You stayed at the orphanage for six years. It wasn’t a horror story, even though, sometimes, you got a strange feeling when you were watching TV in the rec room with the other kids; you used to hate Barney for using up all of the hot water, but you forgot about that after three weeks without anything to read. The two of you were orphans, and Barney started stealing when you were nine and he was twelve; the two of you were orphans, and you got into your first fight when you were eleven and he was fourteen.

Maybe if you’d had the books you used to keep in your room—maybe then you’d see that your life was not, in fact, a life, but a story, and poorly-told one at that.

The two of you ran away when you were thirteen and he was sixteen. Well, he ran away, and you followed.

 

-

 

Natasha’s fingers leave no prints, no marks, on his throat, even though her grasp is tight enough to leave him gasping for air. When he wakes up, the two of you are sitting at his desk. You have a bottle of beer from the minibar behind the file cabinet, and your muddy boots are up on the smooth chestnut. You, for the most part, are a decent guy, but tonight, you feel like being an asshole.

“Who—who are you?” he asks, eyes wide. “You—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Natasha says, crossing her legs. “Have you been hiding something, Mr. Esposito?” She re-crosses, then uncrosses, and gets to her feet. He squirms more as she approaches him, and makes a faint whimpering sound as her fingers brush the back of the chair he’s sitting on. “Is there something you want to tell us?”

You didn’t search the place, but it doesn’t matter. The guards were all outside, not inside; the cameras were all disabled with a little fumbling at the main circuit board. It’s midnight. You’re ninety-nine percent sure that the place is deserted, and the one percent only exists because you’ve been trained to believe nothing for certain.

He won’t tell her, so she breaks his middle finger; he won’t tell her everything, so she finishes with his right hand. He screams, and the sound is oddly comforting in the dim office. Why does it sound so familiar? This was—is—your job, after all.

He tells her, eventually, about the dealers and the legacy costs and the dead agents in the junkyard, and then there’s silence. You finger the pistol in your holster, and Natasha looks at you sharply.

“No,” is all she says.

“We don’t need him anymore,” you say, and Natasha looks at you strangely.

“ _Please,”_ he gasps, the word breaking free of the rest of the babble that’s spouting out of his mouth— _“Please,_ I’ll do anything, what do you—”

In the end, Natasha reaches for her tranquilizers, but they’re all used up; your fingers flutter for your pistol again, but you release it before she sees you. Are you different, or is she? You wonder if—

In the end, Natasha says she’s going to snap his neck, and he starts gasping and screaming all over again, until all that’s coming out are choked little noises. You wonder what this man is like during the daytime—cool, suave, powerful. He was the one who put the hit out on those agents; he has cheated men, and he has killed men, and he has broken every bone in the bodies of men with pregnant wives and children to feed. Do you pity him? That’s not a good question. That’s not a question at all.

In the end, all Natasha really does is break the first finger on his left hand. He passes out, after that, of his own accord. It works out neatly.

After that—

“No blood,” she says. “Jesus Christ. I hope this place is soundproofed. The last thing I need is a squad of cop cars pulling up because some good Samaritan decided that—”

Natasha freezes. Her eyes are stuck to the doorway.

You—

The secretary stares at the two of you with wide, flickering eyes. Her lips are slightly parted, papers clenched so tightly in her fingers that her long red nails have begun to cut through the page. Her lips are slightly parted, and you can feel a scream quavering on her li—

You feel the pistol in your hand after you hear the shot. It’s so fast that she doesn’t have time to scream. One second, you see her, and the next second, her brains are decorating the tasteful brown wallpaper behind the doorway. The sound resonates, and then it’s gone; you can feel Natasha’s eyes on you, and you look at her.

“No loose ends,” you say. “She saw us. She wasn’t supposed to see us.”

Natasha doesn’t—

“Right?” you ask, and you hear a note of desperation in your voice—“This is a simple job. We don’t—we don’t want to make it messy.”

Do you, Clint Barton regret the decisions that you have made? Your logic is sound. Maybe you wouldn’t have done it before, but that doesn’t mean that you’ve done the wrong thing now.

Natasha cleans it up, and you watch. You’re still holding the gun.

 

-

 

You were born somewhere in Waverly, Iowa. You were born in the Waverly Health Center, and you were born again at the Carson Carnival of Travelling Wonders. Barney liked the lion tamer, and you—you liked the lions, and the birds of prey.

“Look at him,” you whispered; watching the archer shoot an arrow through an apple off the head of a clown. “Jesus.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Barney said—“Come on, show’s almost over.”

You talk to the lion tamer, afterwards, and he refers you to the resident zookeeper. You talk to the resident zookeeper, Armando, and he laughs at you.

In the end, the two of you sell yourselves for the job of cleaning up animal shit. You are thirteen years old, and not very tall, but you have muscle, courtesy of all the fights you’ve gotten into. You’re thirteen years old, and you have a little bit of a temper. You’re thirteen years old, and your head is still full of big ideas, and you don’t want to scrape shit out of hay-filled cages.

“Eventually,” Barney mutters to you, one night—“Eventually, we’ll hit it big.”

That night, the swordsman watches you clean up after the elephants.

 

-

 

What do you know about Natasha Romanoff? You know that she has full lips and a turned-up nose. You know that she was a spy in Russia long before your parents died, and that what she did during those years is something that she won’t talk about and something that you don’t have the clearance to know about, anyway. You know that she’s older than she is, and knows things that she shouldn’t, and that you lie with your mouth but she lies with her eyes, her lips, her smile. You know that everything else is left up to chance. Who is she? Natasha Romanoff is everything and no one.

Natasha Romanoff is your friend, which a word which you sometimes forget the meaning of. Natasha Romanoff is your friend, and sometimes, before, you slept together, when you were fortunate enough to have missions with breaks that lined up just barely, even if just for a few hours. You were supposed to be sleeping, eating, resting, but instead you’d kiss a stranger with blonde hair, or blue hair, or black hair, and she’d tell you that she missed you.

You remember—

You remember, one winter, she came back with red hair.

“Missed you,” you murmur, as your teeth find her neck.

You kiss her while unbuttoning her shirt. It’s a soft, feathery fabric, almost like cashmere, and it stands in stark contrast to all of the scrapes and swollen bruises you can feel underneath. You push the shirt off her shoulders and she unhooks her bra. Natasha’s skin is black and blue and yellow and red, and her eyes flicker up to yours like she’s waiting for a challenge, but all you do is slide down, so your bare back fits over the sheets, and pull her onto you.

Eventually, you decide, Natasha Romanoff is beautiful. You’re not sure what it means when you fuck her, when you kiss her, when she kisses back, but you don’t really care as long as you don’t have to sleep in a cold bed in your shitty apartment.

What sounds does Natasha make when you fuck her? To be honest, you don’t really expect much; she’s a spy, and she’s used to silent sex in hallways and behind unlocked doors. You run your hands over her breasts, and she sucks in a breath; you bite her lip, and her warm breath makes you shiver.

You let her plant her hands on your chest, one over each nipple, and sink onto you. How long has it been since you’ve done this? Longer than you’d have liked. Natasha rides you hard, breathing hot and wet above you, your name on her tongue, and you—well, you can’t help the things that come out of your mouth.

“Clint,” she says, and her eyes click with yours. They’re green, this time—green eyes and red hair. You assume that this is the real Natasha, but you’ll never know for sure.

 

-

 

Natasha calls you Barton when she’s in a good mood, Agent Barton when Fury’s in the room, Hawkeye when she’s in the field, and Clint most of the time.

When the two of you get back, she doesn’t call you anything. You fly back in a SHIELD jet, and the sweat on your forehead still hasn’t evaporated by the time you touch down. You feel strangely, unreasonably angry, so you don’t say anything, either. The two of you walk into the SHIELD headquarters like you don’t know one another, which is one of the most ridiculous things you’ve heard of in your life.

“Where have you two been?” Hill asks, as you pass her office. You look through the glass, and she raises an eyebrow.

“Busy,” Natasha says. You don’t say anything, and maybe it’s the wrong decision, because Hill notices.

“Barton,” she says—“You’re due for some more chats. 0500 hours.”

 _Chats._ That’s one of the most ridiculous things you’ve—

“I want to talk to Fury,” you say.                        

“He’s not in,” Hill says. You know better than to ask where he is.

“When’s he coming back?”

“A few days,” she says, and you’re ninety-five percent sure she’s lying, but you don’t push her further.

 

-

 

You were born somewhere in Waverly, Iowa. You were born in the Waverly Health Center, and you were born again at the Carson Carnival of Travelling Wonders. Barney liked the lion tamer, and you—the two of you sold yourselves for the honor of cleaning up animal shit.

You have never felt as angry, as fiercely determined to _do_ something with your life as do in the circus. You want to hit it big, but what can you do? More often than not, you end up facedown in the dirt tasting blood on your teeth. More often than not, you go visit the veterinarian, who’ll shake his head and tell you that you should have stayed where you came from.

 

-

 

You were born somewhere in Waverly, Iowa, and you were born again at the Carson Carnival of Travelling Wonders.

“You,” the swordsman says, and you turn around and ask, _me?_ even though you don’t—

 

-

 

Sometimes, you think about funny it was, how easily they accepted you when you turned back. Did you really expect them to take you again in the first place? You’re not sure if you would have done the same. You tried to kill all of them—they have it in for Loki because he had it in for them, but the fact that you attempted to murder all of them in cold blood seems to have slipped their minds. It’s amazing what a little cerebral recalibration can do, isn’t it?

They talk about humanity, and revenge, and evil, and you sit at the end of the conference table with your gun holstered and your thumbs twiddling, resisting the urge to stand up and introduce yourself. _Hi, I’m Clint Barton, and I wanted all of your heads on a silver platter._

And they’d say, _Hi, Clint—_

What’s the real difference, before and after and after that? Before Loki, you were you, or maybe the version of you that SHIELD was interested in; after Loki, you were still you, but there were new doors without locks, and when you opened them, you discovered things that you’d never known and could not turn your back upon. They say mind-control, you say mind control, but you remember _new ideas._ You don’t exactly remember what it felt like, but you remember how real it was. You were you. You didn’t do anything against your own will.

And after that—well, you’re you now, aren’t you?

 

-

 

Hill calls you at 1300.

“Fury’s here,” she says. If she were Natasha, that would be the end of the call, but she isn’t. You wonder, for a second, where the hell Natasha is—but you know better than to think things like that, after a while.

“Where?” you ask.

“Break room,” she says. “I think he’s hiding.”

“From me?”

“From you,” she confirms.

It’s actually a little strange. You figure you’ve been waiting long enough, so you head down the hallway. The door is open.

“Sir,” you say, and Fury jumps even though he doesn’t look the least bit surprised.

“Barton,” he says, and takes a sip of coffee. You look at his face. He looks tired; you don’t need to use any of the observation techniques they drill the rookies with to figure that out. There is, however, the fact that he needs a cup of coffee at one in the afternoon; you take it that Fury’s been traveling. Jet lag.

“I have something to show you,” he says, and sets the cup down on the counter with a sigh. “New tapes.” He looks up at you without turning his head. “Well, that isn’t exactly the truth. Old tapes. Newly released.” Fury reaches for the doorknob, swings the door open, doesn’t wait for you. “Walk with me,” he says.

 

-

 

You were born somewhere in Waverly, Iowa, and you died in the Swordsman’s tent at the Carson Carnival of Travelling Wonders, standing in front of him on a cold night with the wind blowing on the canvas around the pair of you. There are knives on the walls, and bows sitting in a quiver at his feet, and—well, you figure that you’ll be able to at least do some damage with the pens on the table. If it comes to that.

“What’s your name?” he asks, and now you’re not _you_ anymore, now you’re Clint.

“Do you want to be great, Clint?”

It’s like—it’s like those fairy tales you used to read, except now you’re too old for them, and too tired for them. The Swordsman is your fairy godmother, and you’re Cinderella, you’re Pinocchio, you’re every little kid who wished on a star. You look into his eyes and see something you haven’t for a long time, and you look at his hands, calloused and strong, and wonder if—

“I can help you,” he adds. “I can help you become better than this.”

You say yes. Of course you say yes. Why wouldn’t you say yes?

 

-

 

Fury shows you the tape.

It’s a grainy image, but you can clearly see yourself, and you can see Loki, and you can see Selvig in the background, working to build the device that will eventually rip a hole in the universe above Stark Tower. Loki says something to you in a burbled voice, and Fury looks at you like’s going to ask, but you—

Loki says something to you, and you drop onto your knees. He runs a hand through your hair, and then he says something else, and you cast a glance at Selvig, who’s staring at the both of you now. You look at Selvig, and he looks at Loki, and Loki looks at you, and the same sound comes out of his mouth.

 

-

 

“That’s—” you swallow. “That’s me.”

“Do you remember this?” Fury asks.

You look at him, and he looks at you, and you’re pretty sure that both of you know the answer. You say it anyway, _yes_ in a voice that could be answering a number of questions— _are you okay? did you have a good night’s sleep? want to go out for pizza afterwards? did you just get on your knees and—_

“You said these tapes were released, sir?”

“To us,” Fury says. “To SHIELD.” He looks at you for a long time, and this time, you can’t quite pinpoint what that expression in his eyes is.

“We can destroy them,” he says. “We know that—”

You can feel yourself drifting away. Your gaze falls back to the screen, and the video is looping over and over again, that same sound and the same result, the same look on your face when your head drops against Loki’s thigh. The funny thing is, you don’t recognize the person in the tape. Would it change anything, now, anyway, if you did? Natasha’s not talking to you, Fury doesn’t particularly want to talk to you, Pepper’s being forced to talk to you, and sometimes you look in the mirror and—

“You don’t have to,” you say, finally. “It doesn’t matter, sir.”

 

-

 

Loki tells you that you have heart. You don’t remember exactly what you were thinking when he said it to you, but you think it was something along the lines of anger and confusion threaded with something new, something strange, something to prove. You remember the smell of elephant shit and burnt hotdogs and fireworks, even though you also remember standing in a dark room surrounded by men in suits and fluorescent lights, and then you remember something else.

 

-

 

How do you feel about traitors? You’ve killed traitors for money. You’ve killed traitors for revenge. You have never killed a traitor for fun. You don’t remember if you killed any in the past few weeks, or in the past few days, but you guess that you probably have.

Before, way before, you didn’t have much patience for them. Natasha was always the one who liked torture—screws under fingernails, pulling teeth with pliers, bending fingers backwards. You like your bow and arrow, but you were never in the mood for them with traitors, were you? Not with traitors. All did back then was find your pistol, wait in a dark room, and make sure you didn’t get any blood on your pants when you walked out.

Sometimes, you wish that someone would—

“You shouldn’t think things like that,” Natasha says, even though you’ve been staring at the target in front of you with your mouth shut for the past five minutes. Your lips are dry when you part them, and when your eyes meet hers, you know there’s really nothing to say.

 

-

 

End with a card game. Who’s there? Natasha, Hill, and Fury, sitting at a round table. The red and blue backs of cards smile at you as they shuffle them, rearrange them. How many nights have you spent doing this—staring at faces that you could read before, trying to guess what they’re really thinking? You don’t remember. You used to be good at this game.

Fury’s got nothing; Natasha’s got four of a kind. Hill’s got a pair, and Stark’s got two, and you—well, you fold.


End file.
